I recently bought a 286 PC on Ebay. It has a hardware card for controlling racks of slide projectors. (Remember those old bajillion projector slide shows in the '80s? I still make those.) The software that drives the card (VER5 from AVL) is from September 1981.
Unfortunately, I have since discovered that nobody sells 5.25" floppies any more. Good thing there's 30MB left on the hard drive. That should last a lifetime!
Authors retain the copyright to most books published in the United States; they simply license reproduction and distribution rights to a publisher. Terms vary, but typically the rights revert to the author when the book goes out-of-print. So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
But now I see a strange pattern as I investigate the books on my nearest shelf. Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books. Has O'Reily been forcing its authors to assign all copyrights?
These days, instead of asking for money, most developers place the products for free (if they can) or pay a company for the use of a logo (if they must).
The reason: Name brands enhance the realism of a game.
I'm not sure what you're quoting when you say "pinpoint accuracy." If you read my original post, all I said was that, according to this article, money often flows the opposite direction.
I read an article on embedded logos and ads in video games. I lost the link. In the old days, (e.g., Pole Position), companies paid the game makers to include their logos. Today, however, the money often flows the opposite way. Game makers have to pay for the right to include the brand names they want to make the game environment realistic.
Before I even clicked I knew there was a company willing to register my copyrights with the United States government via the internet for a fraction of the cost via lawyer.
Slightly off-topic, but what did you need a service or a lawyer for? You can register a copyright directly with the Library of Congress by mail with a trivial form and a small free. $35 last time I did it.
I went to Best Buy to purchase a replacement ink cartridge. The store employee told me that you can use the HP 45 cartridges in place of the HP 15 cartridges. She explained that the 45 was just the economy size of the 15. She showed me HP 45s running in the demo models. She showed me that the 45 was the same form factor as the 15. I believed her.
Too bad my printer didn't.
Anybody need a non-returnable $48 HP 45 cartridge?
Perhaps I don't belong on slashdot. I seem to have a different opinion than most of you. This is not intended as flamebait or a troll.
The RIAA sending instant messages to the song-swappers is a clever idea. Song swapping is illegal. I'll agree that the DMCA is an evil law, but I see value in the traditional concepts of copyright as did the framers of the Constitution.
If you're a song-swapper because you feel it's a form of civil disobedience--a protest against the the music industry or IP law--fine. I think it's a horrible approach, since it merely arms the RIAA lobbyists with amunition to push through more crap like the DMCA.
It's important to realize that many, many people who are downloading "free" music on the Internet are not part of the civil disobedience movement. They just want music without paying for it. I'd guess that decribes the vast majority of participants. When confronted with the ethics of it, they may "join" the movement, but in many cases, that's just rationalization to continue grabbing tunes for free.
I know (personally) only half a dozen people who use song swapping services, from pre-teens to older, educated adults. None of them recognized that what they were doing was illegal. They honestly thought that music on the Internet was free. I think it's safe to assume that many participants are in the same boat. The RIAA found a creative way to inform people that what they're doing is illegal.
(I don't know how well the RIAA messages were targetted.)
The RIAA is an organization that represents an industry. It's their job to protect the interests of that industry. I'm sure they honestly believe that the explosion of rampant piracy is the primary cause of the downturn in the industry. From an industry point of view, peer-to-peer infringement was an overnight occurence. There was no warning. There was no chance to evolve the business models. And the threat is a consequence of illegal activity. You have to expect them to use everything they can to fight it. If you were falsely accused of a crime and your lawyer could get the charge thrown out on a technicality, you'd insist on it. If the EFF managed to use the DMCA against privacy invaders, we'd all cheer. The RIAA is looking for every weapon they can find.
And the civilly disobedient members of the song-swap movement are helping to arm them. They increase the infringement numbers, which is exactly the exuse the RIAA needs to justify dropping industry revenue. (You can argue that the drop is due to other causes, and you might be right, but it's not provable. Congress and the courts are likely to believe the industry experts who can show that since 60 million Americans started downloading music on the Internet, revenues have dropped by billions.)
If you think the music industry treats artists badly, then boycott them, or write editorials, or organize a picket. If you think the industry is near-monopolistic and engaged in price-fixing, then dig up the dirt and get the trust-busters after them. If you think indies get the short end of the stick in this industry, then support your local indies. But don't delude yourself into thinking that downloading music without paying is going to further your principles.
Has anybody tried to prosecute spammers for executing what amounts to a denial of service attack? When 99% of your email is unsolicited commercial bulk email, it makes that 1% very hard to find. Isn't this a small scale DoS attack on an individual? Isn't the cumulative effect on ISPs huge?
When I moved into my new home, I discovered the previous owners were mail-order people. I was receiving 100-120 catalogs every week (literally). My recycling company refused to cart off our weekly junk mail. Bills were getting lost, wedged between the pages of catalogs. I registered with the DMA, and I sent over 350 letters and made more than 100 phone calls to snail-mail spammers. Eventually it made difference. Now (three years later) we get about 10 catalogs a week. I spent a lot of time and money (postage, envelopes, etc.), but at least most of the 200 companies respected our wishes (in time, after multiple notices).
With email spam, we don't even have the option of complaining and opting-out. And yes, email bills are sometimes blocked by my ISP's spam filters. So haven't the spammers effectively eliminated our email service by flooding it? Isn't that a denial of service attack?
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Could you elaborate on this? I was a VMS fan and system manager for a few years, and I've never heard these allegations.
When's the Zork movie coming out? They've been talking about that since the 1980s.;-)
Innovations in form as well as content are possible. There are already CFS games that try to give the player a graphic view of his surroundings.... On the other hand, the player's imagination probably has a more detailed picture of the Great Underground Empire than could ever be drawn. I can even recall discussions among the game's implementors over who should play the thief in the movie version. --P David Lebling, one of the co-creators of Zork
The film, much like the game, will follow a highly decorated Army Ranger who is recruited into the Office of Secret Actions and tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart occult and genetic experiments being conducted there by Nazis.
Um, isn't that a bit of an anachronism? Watson and Crick (and Franklin) didn't really figure out DNA until 1953.
DLP has it's advantages and disadvantages. So far, I prefer film. Black levels are only one part of the story (and they're quite good with film). Other factors are saturation and the density of illumination levels within the contrast range.
I purposely forced myself to see AOTC twice, once on film and once in digital. Yes, I know that the source is digital, but still the film version was better. Perhaps the telecine process smeared the digital artifacts when the master print was struck.
The local theatre that went to DLP had to shrink their screen dramatically, presumably because the digital projectors can't throw as much light on the screen. The screen was perforated for sound, and that created moire patterns in the digital theatre. The end credits were illegible! Dark scenes were very muddy (wrong gamma correction?). I will agree that the total absence of film jitter and the reduced flickering were improvements.
I wasn't totally thrilled with the visual quality of the film version, either. Compression artifacts from the digital source were everywhere. And 24-bit color isn't really true color. Regardless of resolution, you need more bits to match film in dynamic range. It saddens me to think this is the future of cinema.
Oh, and if you think digital projection is going to make the projection booth more trouble free, think again. One of our local theatres still uses film projection for the feature, but they recently replaced the advertising slides before the film with a digital projector. Some of the ads now have video clips. Unfortunately, they kept freezing and skipping like a dying TiVo. Now your projectionists are going to have to learn how to defrag a hard drive.
In the long wrong, many of these drawbacks could be overcome. Multiple projectors could be used to cover the screen, improving brightness and resolution. Advances in bandwidth and/or compression techniques might reduce the jaggies. Heck, we might eventually color formats that can approach the subtlety of film. But I'm afraid we'll have reached a "good enough" attitude and have accepted the losses inflicted by this premature jump to digital.
Can you imagine the tech support calls from the booth? "Our projector keeps hanging when we switch from our trailers to our feature." "Let me guess, your trailers are MPEG 4 and your feature is WMV. OK, what you gotta do is convert the WMV to QuickTime, but first you'll have to get around the DRM..."
Suppose you install a spam filter that uses an encrypted list of keywords, presumably so other filtering products can't copy its list. Over time spammers will figure out which words trigger the filter, and they'll start using different words, or creative misspellings with the intent of bypassing the filter. In effect, they've reverse engineered a product which uses digital encryption to protect its IP. Therefore, the spammers have violated the DMCA.
OK, it's a stretch. But we have the DMCA, so we should be able to find some legitimate use for it.
At least the porn industry supports filtering software.
I saw a PBS documentary years ago about differences between men's and women's brains. They cited studies showing that women's scores in certain spatial tests are slightly lower than men's. The documentary claimed the results are usually overstated. The difference in scores was only in one very specific spatial task. Unfortunately, they never explained the task in detail, but it was a 3-D problem.
What was even more interesting is that this difference was not hardwired; rather, it was hormonal. The first clue was when they retested the same women at different points in their menstrual cycle, their scores varied. Men's scores were very consistent. Furthermore, when they gave a small dose of testosterone to women, their scores came up to match the men, and when they gave a small dose of estrogen to men, their scores dropped. Fascinating.
I've Googled to see if I could dig up something more concrete than my memory of this documentary. All I found were citations of studies looking at how brain performance varies with hormone levels.
I've been doing all that tivo stuff with my trusty VCR for the last 10 years.
No, you really haven't.
You've never watched a recorded show while your VCR is recording a different show, unless you have two VCRs.
You've never started watching a show with your VCR before it finished recording the show.
You've not gone on vacation for 18 days and come back to find your VCR recorded every one of your favorite shows, including the ones that got rescheduled to unusual timeslots.
You've not skipped commercials at 60x.
You've never come home to discover that your VCR recorded an awesome movie because, based on other things you like, it thought you might like it.
You've never decided you didn't like the show you were watching and, within seconds, reclaimed the space on your tape and started watching a different show.
You've never told your VCR to record a show only if it isn't a rerun.
You've never chosen from an automatically labeled list of recorded shows (including episode descriptions) and started watching within seconds.
I used my VCR several times a week for years before I got my TiVo. It's totally different.
Yes, I'm a TiVo fanatic, despite the fact that I despise MPEG artifacts.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently bought a 286 PC on Ebay. It has a hardware card for controlling racks of slide projectors. (Remember those old bajillion projector slide shows in the '80s? I still make those.) The software that drives the card (VER5 from AVL) is from September 1981.
Unfortunately, I have since discovered that nobody sells 5.25" floppies any more. Good thing there's 30MB left on the hard drive. That should last a lifetime!
Authors retain the copyright to most books published in the United States; they simply license reproduction and distribution rights to a publisher. Terms vary, but typically the rights revert to the author when the book goes out-of-print. So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
But now I see a strange pattern as I investigate the books on my nearest shelf. Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books. Has O'Reily been forcing its authors to assign all copyrights?
Electronic Arts pays the NFL a licensing fee for use of team logos in their games.
Proof: EA's annual report and press releases.
Fine, make me Google all afternoon for the article:
What's in a name: Product placement in gamesI'm not sure what you're quoting when you say "pinpoint accuracy." If you read my original post, all I said was that, according to this article, money often flows the opposite direction.
I read an article on embedded logos and ads in video games. I lost the link. In the old days, (e.g., Pole Position), companies paid the game makers to include their logos. Today, however, the money often flows the opposite way. Game makers have to pay for the right to include the brand names they want to make the game environment realistic.
Slightly off-topic, but what did you need a service or a lawyer for? You can register a copyright directly with the Library of Congress by mail with a trivial form and a small free. $35 last time I did it.
Did you mean a patent application?
I went to Best Buy to purchase a replacement ink cartridge. The store employee told me that you can use the HP 45 cartridges in place of the HP 15 cartridges. She explained that the 45 was just the economy size of the 15. She showed me HP 45s running in the demo models. She showed me that the 45 was the same form factor as the 15. I believed her.
Too bad my printer didn't.
Anybody need a non-returnable $48 HP 45 cartridge?
Business Model Patent Application
Step 1: Lobby to pass a law like the DMCA which restricts the right to reverse engineer for the purpose of creating compatible products.
Step 2: Make a proprietary consumable.
Step 3: Use technology to restrict the life of the consumable.
Step 4: Sue those who try to offer an alternative (see Step 1).
Step 5: Jack up the prices.
Damn prior art!
Perhaps I don't belong on slashdot. I seem to have a different opinion than most of you. This is not intended as flamebait or a troll.
The RIAA sending instant messages to the song-swappers is a clever idea. Song swapping is illegal. I'll agree that the DMCA is an evil law, but I see value in the traditional concepts of copyright as did the framers of the Constitution.
If you're a song-swapper because you feel it's a form of civil disobedience--a protest against the the music industry or IP law--fine. I think it's a horrible approach, since it merely arms the RIAA lobbyists with amunition to push through more crap like the DMCA.
It's important to realize that many, many people who are downloading "free" music on the Internet are not part of the civil disobedience movement. They just want music without paying for it. I'd guess that decribes the vast majority of participants. When confronted with the ethics of it, they may "join" the movement, but in many cases, that's just rationalization to continue grabbing tunes for free.
I know (personally) only half a dozen people who use song swapping services, from pre-teens to older, educated adults. None of them recognized that what they were doing was illegal. They honestly thought that music on the Internet was free. I think it's safe to assume that many participants are in the same boat. The RIAA found a creative way to inform people that what they're doing is illegal.
(I don't know how well the RIAA messages were targetted.)
The RIAA is an organization that represents an industry. It's their job to protect the interests of that industry. I'm sure they honestly believe that the explosion of rampant piracy is the primary cause of the downturn in the industry. From an industry point of view, peer-to-peer infringement was an overnight occurence. There was no warning. There was no chance to evolve the business models. And the threat is a consequence of illegal activity. You have to expect them to use everything they can to fight it. If you were falsely accused of a crime and your lawyer could get the charge thrown out on a technicality, you'd insist on it. If the EFF managed to use the DMCA against privacy invaders, we'd all cheer. The RIAA is looking for every weapon they can find.
And the civilly disobedient members of the song-swap movement are helping to arm them. They increase the infringement numbers, which is exactly the exuse the RIAA needs to justify dropping industry revenue. (You can argue that the drop is due to other causes, and you might be right, but it's not provable. Congress and the courts are likely to believe the industry experts who can show that since 60 million Americans started downloading music on the Internet, revenues have dropped by billions.)
If you think the music industry treats artists badly, then boycott them, or write editorials, or organize a picket. If you think the industry is near-monopolistic and engaged in price-fixing, then dig up the dirt and get the trust-busters after them. If you think indies get the short end of the stick in this industry, then support your local indies. But don't delude yourself into thinking that downloading music without paying is going to further your principles.
Wow, Google cache is /.ed!
And doesn't Google's cache violate the DMCA?
Has anybody tried to prosecute spammers for executing what amounts to a denial of service attack? When 99% of your email is unsolicited commercial bulk email, it makes that 1% very hard to find. Isn't this a small scale DoS attack on an individual? Isn't the cumulative effect on ISPs huge?
When I moved into my new home, I discovered the previous owners were mail-order people. I was receiving 100-120 catalogs every week (literally). My recycling company refused to cart off our weekly junk mail. Bills were getting lost, wedged between the pages of catalogs. I registered with the DMA, and I sent over 350 letters and made more than 100 phone calls to snail-mail spammers. Eventually it made difference. Now (three years later) we get about 10 catalogs a week. I spent a lot of time and money (postage, envelopes, etc.), but at least most of the 200 companies respected our wishes (in time, after multiple notices).
With email spam, we don't even have the option of complaining and opting-out. And yes, email bills are sometimes blocked by my ISP's spam filters. So haven't the spammers effectively eliminated our email service by flooding it? Isn't that a denial of service attack?
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Could you elaborate on this? I was a VMS fan and system manager for a few years, and I've never heard these allegations.
Re: Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Um, isn't that a bit of an anachronism? Watson and Crick (and Franklin) didn't really figure out DNA until 1953.
DLP has it's advantages and disadvantages. So far, I prefer film. Black levels are only one part of the story (and they're quite good with film). Other factors are saturation and the density of illumination levels within the contrast range.
I purposely forced myself to see AOTC twice, once on film and once in digital. Yes, I know that the source is digital, but still the film version was better. Perhaps the telecine process smeared the digital artifacts when the master print was struck.
The local theatre that went to DLP had to shrink their screen dramatically, presumably because the digital projectors can't throw as much light on the screen. The screen was perforated for sound, and that created moire patterns in the digital theatre. The end credits were illegible! Dark scenes were very muddy (wrong gamma correction?). I will agree that the total absence of film jitter and the reduced flickering were improvements.
I wasn't totally thrilled with the visual quality of the film version, either. Compression artifacts from the digital source were everywhere. And 24-bit color isn't really true color. Regardless of resolution, you need more bits to match film in dynamic range. It saddens me to think this is the future of cinema.
Oh, and if you think digital projection is going to make the projection booth more trouble free, think again. One of our local theatres still uses film projection for the feature, but they recently replaced the advertising slides before the film with a digital projector. Some of the ads now have video clips. Unfortunately, they kept freezing and skipping like a dying TiVo. Now your projectionists are going to have to learn how to defrag a hard drive.
In the long wrong, many of these drawbacks could be overcome. Multiple projectors could be used to cover the screen, improving brightness and resolution. Advances in bandwidth and/or compression techniques might reduce the jaggies. Heck, we might eventually color formats that can approach the subtlety of film. But I'm afraid we'll have reached a "good enough" attitude and have accepted the losses inflicted by this premature jump to digital.
Can you imagine the tech support calls from the booth? "Our projector keeps hanging when we switch from our trailers to our feature." "Let me guess, your trailers are MPEG 4 and your feature is WMV. OK, what you gotta do is convert the WMV to QuickTime, but first you'll have to get around the DRM..."
Aid.Suppose you install a spam filter that uses an encrypted list of keywords, presumably so other filtering products can't copy its list. Over time spammers will figure out which words trigger the filter, and they'll start using different words, or creative misspellings with the intent of bypassing the filter. In effect, they've reverse engineered a product which uses digital encryption to protect its IP. Therefore, the spammers have violated the DMCA.
OK, it's a stretch. But we have the DMCA, so we should be able to find some legitimate use for it.
At least the porn industry supports filtering software.
I saw a PBS documentary years ago about differences between men's and women's brains. They cited studies showing that women's scores in certain spatial tests are slightly lower than men's. The documentary claimed the results are usually overstated. The difference in scores was only in one very specific spatial task. Unfortunately, they never explained the task in detail, but it was a 3-D problem.
What was even more interesting is that this difference was not hardwired; rather, it was hormonal. The first clue was when they retested the same women at different points in their menstrual cycle, their scores varied. Men's scores were very consistent. Furthermore, when they gave a small dose of testosterone to women, their scores came up to match the men, and when they gave a small dose of estrogen to men, their scores dropped. Fascinating.
I've Googled to see if I could dig up something more concrete than my memory of this documentary. All I found were citations of studies looking at how brain performance varies with hormone levels.
No, you really haven't.
You've never watched a recorded show while your VCR is recording a different show, unless you have two VCRs.
You've never started watching a show with your VCR before it finished recording the show.
You've not gone on vacation for 18 days and come back to find your VCR recorded every one of your favorite shows, including the ones that got rescheduled to unusual timeslots.
You've not skipped commercials at 60x.
You've never come home to discover that your VCR recorded an awesome movie because, based on other things you like, it thought you might like it.
You've never decided you didn't like the show you were watching and, within seconds, reclaimed the space on your tape and started watching a different show.
You've never told your VCR to record a show only if it isn't a rerun.
You've never chosen from an automatically labeled list of recorded shows (including episode descriptions) and started watching within seconds.
I used my VCR several times a week for years before I got my TiVo. It's totally different.
Yes, I'm a TiVo fanatic, despite the fact that I despise MPEG artifacts.